Is Returning To The Old Normal Waiting For Godot?

Since the pandemic started, it seems that the privileged part of the whole world is waiting for a return to life as it was. That is privileged part of the world.

One thing that many of us have became more aware of last year is that that the old normal, what now seems like the 'good old days,' was not the same for everyone.  Many, but not enough, of us became more aware of the systemic racism that has, from its beginning, plagued this nation. The police murder of George Floyd served as a catalyst to an 'a ha moment' finally experienced by many whites. But before that, we had the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and Critical Race Theory (CRT) which also have been trying to sting our corporate consciences about how that old normal was cancerous.

Of course, many conservatives objected to this awareness claiming that today's racial problems are the result of mentioning racism in society. They claimed that in the name of Martin Luther King Jr. because, they said that, he believed in a colorblind society. Therefore mentioning the races of the perpetrator and their victims only creates racism. They never questioned whether what they called Color-blindness is what King referred to as Color-blindness.

They also heavily criticized and rejected Critical Race Theory (CRT). But the focus of their objections to how CRT described racism was in terms of how CRT's description of racism related to them: the possible promoters of racism. In reality, and certainly not with out faults, CRT describes racism in terms of how it relates to the victims of racism. Thus, the conservative reaction to CRT shows a problem with self-absorption that many faithful rule followers suffer from whether they are conservative or not.

And if we think that there are systemic problems with racism, the environment would like to point out that it too suffers from systemic antagonism and violence. From our reliance on packaging and products that cannot be recycled, to our concentration on big buildings in specific locations, to our extraction of water for profit and farming, to our reliance on fossil fuels for energy, our very way of life, either as individuals or in groups, provide one assault after another on the environment. And finally, the earth is striking back.

As Johan Rockström has pointed out in the Netflix documentary Breaking Boundaries, when we attack the environment, we are not attacking the earth, we are attacking the earth's ability to support human life. For the earth to support human life, there needs to be a stable climate, healthy ecosystems, a rich diversity of life, and a recycling of waste from earth's many different life forms to life sustaining material. But when our way of life is causing earth's rotational axis to change, our temperatures to soar, wildfire seasons to increase, the permafrost to thaw and release methane, we have crossed a line that we cannot return to.

So now, in terms of the environment, we are suppose to be in damage control mode. We are suppose to act so that we can mitigate the future changes in the climate. And if we do what we are suppose to do, then there is no going back to the good old days. Waiting for a return of what was normal for the past is something that we should neither attempt nor want to happen. That is because we need to change how we have treated the environment.

So whether it is in terms of how we treat each other or how we treat our home planet, we cannot return to the good old days. We cannot return to denying how our Western Civilization has waged war against people of color. Nor can we go on denying how our way of life is denying our descendants from having a decent future on earth. There is no return to life before the pandemic. Some things have changed for a relative forever. And that is without any regard for the pandemic.